"A list for improving literacy with focus on middle grades." <[email protected]> on Monday, January 21, 2008 at 12:26 PM -0500 wrote: >Bill I wonder if we could adapt Atwell's personal spelling words >technique for vocabulary. I needed to revisit this for my students as >well and wonder if we can brainstorm this. For Atwell, Kids generate >a list from their writing in which they have misspelled a word. She >suggests five words per week that they focus on learning. For vocab >our students could cross content areas and bring in the vocab they >need from math, science, SS and ELA! There is a buddy system >assessment piece in which students give and correct each others words >moving them to a list that shows they have demonstrated how to spell ( >in our case they show the understand the word meanings) This may prove >to be the tricky part. I have a context organizer created by Randi >Allen that I adapted for taking words from a text and learning what it >means. I'll email you a copy if you like. But with Atwell every few >weeks she has the kids revisit the "learned list" and they may have to >move a word back for re-learning...
Hi! One thing I love about this is revisiting words as it would seem to help them make the learning more permanent. I also like the idea about bringing in content from other courses - for us, it would have to be different words than were on a list assigned by that class, but it should still work out. I'd love to see your graphic organizer, and brainstorm some more about these techniques and how they might apply to vocabulary. We got heavily involved with the ending to Romeo and Juliet today (quote from a student: "Well, THAT was depressing!"), and never did get to talk vocabulary in class. Perhaps tomorrow! Take care, Bill Ivey Stoneleigh-Burnham School _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
